White Hand Weaves
Maglama Moixa
Work was always a dream. Not the kind of dream people aspire to have, more like one where you want nothing more than to wake up. If I got the little black card in between my door I’d come alive every night at around 11 PM to start my day. Leaving at night was necessary to make sure we wouldn’t get seen by any locals. They would say sleep deprivation helped keep us creative, one of many lies the company told to promote its philosophies. I pried open my dusky eyelids with water, grabbing at my reserves of sanity to make it through the next session of work. Every once in a while, I’d check under my clothes to make sure there was still someone underneath. When I was still there, I would pray the kind of silent prayer that people do before doing something dangerous, like skydiving.
Then I eat breakfast. I get in my car, an old Honda my late mother gave me that I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of, and I start the meandering drive to the southern side of town. I remember the weight around my eyes, how I couldn’t think about anything other than driving for an hour because if I let my mind wander I’d go back to sleep. My body desired what the money I was making couldn’t give it. Coffee and energy drinks stopped working after a few months working down there. Maybe my body adjusted, but no human being was really made for that kind of work.
Ah, right. The destination. I’d park the decrepit machine (that could get me from A to B but never to C) a couple blocks away from the place I was supposed to be going. Never the same place twice; We weren’t supposed to build routine because routine would get noticed. After that, I’d go into one of the abandoned buildings. You know the kind, the brick monuments that make the city all the more gray. Businesses long gone, apartment buildings that kids make up ghost stories about, those were the kinds of places where the company sets up entrances. In each one you would go in the back and punch in some numbers on a padlock to a door leading into whatever building it was. It was always a different series of numbers in case we were followed, but it always had 7 in there. Once opened, you’d take the elevator down. You have to press the button for the lowest possible floor 13 times. Some of my coworkers had to do it in a rhythm since their buildings were in more densely populated areas, but I got lucky with a simple one. The elevator goes down for a while. I mean a while. By this point I’m awake so I can assess the boredom of it, counting seconds in my head, visualizing these ghostly numbers. reaching around two thousand before the doors finally open.
White Hand Weaves Headquarters is always so quiet, deafeningly quiet if no one is speaking. The only thing I can confirm to be true there is the sound of my own footsteps against the hard, polished stone floors the color of snow. Everything else felt fake, like a mouse might feel in a maze searching for cheese. White walls banded with art of all eras, oppressive fluorescent lights lining the ceiling, There were tons of instructions we had to follow, most of which I’ve forgotten, but most of them involved not staring at any particular thing for too long. The paintings especially. Some of my coworkers were lucid, most I could hardly get a conversation out of. I tried warning one, an older guy who looked to be about 50, to not stare at the paintings. It’s difficult to watch the color drain out of someone’s skin.
When I was employed at White Hand Weaves, I was just a fashion designer. I had gone to college and majored in Fashion Studies, a passion of mine since I was young. I was looking into internships and the one there stuck out to me, mainly because it was paid but also because of the great opportunity it was for someone of my age, green and looking to poke a hole of entry into the industry.
Artistic people are odd creatures, but I remember the interview process being particularly abnormal though. We met at this public office building that wasn’t owned by the company, it seemed to be more like a rented space because there were a bunch of other people in suits there. My interviewer wore this cool holographic white jacket with a pair of shades hiding his eyes. He had the kind of expression that led me to believe he wasn’t really looking at me, but through me. Other than the ordinary rigamarole, my strengths and weaknesses, why I want the job, they asked me a whole host of unexpected questions. Was I religious? Had I ever experienced something paranormal? Did I live alone? I answered as truthfully as possible and got the job that same day, due to start on the night of that weekend. That was... fourteen years ago now. I never saw that interviewer again. A week later, I got a black card stuck between my door, and it all began for me.
As for my everyday work, my main place of work was this very cold, circular room with a wide glass tube in the middle. I would work tirelessly, from around 2 AM to 2 PM the next day sketching different rough designs for shirts, pants, leggings, hats, footwear, anything. When I looked up between drawings, I’d see “it.” We were ordered to never stare at the tube for too long because of the thing that was inside, they called it the Weaver. When I asked about the thing, my superiors told me to stop, but I got lucky one night with something resembling an answer. “It’s how we got our name. It weaves.”
The Weaver was this... corpse. It was tall, much taller than any normal person, and it looked vaguely like a man that had been drowned in salt water and left to float in a frozen lake for months, decomposition prevented by a deep, biting frost. Its disheveled skin was not the pearly white that surrounded it in the underground building, but a grisly almost blue silver. It had two arms that grotesquely branched off into a second pair of forearms, those hands being used to... What else? Thread and stitch together clothing. Out of my peripheral vision, I’d see it staring at me, watching me outline, and as soon as I finished it would somehow create exactly what I was imagining, no matter how complicated. Everything about it frightened me, but I knew better than to ask more questions than necessary. I wanted the job and I wanted the money, and if they got this thing imprisoned, I couldn’t have imagined what they’d do to me.
A lot of my designs became used by celebrities, especially at special events like galas, festivals, and billionaire get-togethers. White Hand Weaves would never credit me directly though, the fame like the screams of a crowd onto an empty football field, never to be heard or appreciated by the players. One day I was told I was fired and that was the end of it all. Seven days later, the company declared bankruptcy as the CEO became a missing person case. After that, I stopped keeping up with the news.
I still get nightmares about my experiences there. I was never attacked, never a victim of abuse of any kind, I was afraid of something else. The uncanny feeling of something being off that no one else wanted to acknowledge ate away at me every night. There was something so absolutely wrong and there were so few answers that my imagination conjures up something much worse than my experience there.
Sometimes I swear the Weaver is still there, lurking at the edges of what I can see before vanishing into thin air. The last time I ever saw it was on my final day at work, as I was preparing to leave the design room roundtable, on my last step before reaching the door, it tapped at the glass behind me.
